The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (17 page)

For 50-year-old Raquel, a mother of two who was laid off from her data-entry job in a working-class suburb of Los Angeles during
the recession, navigating the increasingly coercive welfare system had become a desperate endeavor.

Raquel’s employer hadn’t paid into the unemployment insurance program, and so she wasn’t eligible to receive unemployment benefits. She ran through her savings, borrowed what she could from almost equally hard-pressed relatives, applied for food stamps, and ultimately managed to qualify for the CalWORKs program. CalWORKs is the state’s version of TANF, and at the time Raquel accessed it, it had already gone through years of budget cuts. Recipients were limited to forty-eight months on the program; but, increasingly, there was talk of cutting this to twenty-four. Moreover, the amount they received during these months kept being reduced. Every four weeks, Raquel was sent a check for $317, $200 of which immediately went to the rent she paid to stay in her brother’s house, the rest of which vanished buying household necessities.

Raquel had applied for dozens of jobs; but, caught in the vise of recession, she had ended up with nothing. To stay eligible for that CalWORKS money, Raquel now had to spend hours a week doing community service jobs—mainly interviewing clients who came to a nearby community center, MEND, in the gritty town of Pacoima, to see if they would qualify for charitable assistance.

It was, in a way, lucky that she was there. The CalWORKS payments were so small that she never had any cash left over for food—which meant that she had to make the $300 she got in food stamps last an entire month. And because her two sons were both going through puberty and eating her out of house and home, that was never possible. Each month, about a week before she received her next installment of food stamps, Raquel would have to shamefacedly ask her MEND employers for a box of food to tide her over. For three or four days, the family would have just about enough to eat; no meat, but enough canned goods to throw together a few meals. For the last few days of the month, however, they’d frequently go hungry. No matter how she scrimped and saved, it was, said Raquel, “a struggle trying to make the meal.”

By the winter of 2012, when I met her, Raquel had been out of work for close to eighteen months. There was talk of ending CalWORKs as a way of plugging California’s vast budget hole; there was more talk about keeping the program but reducing the number of months people could receive benefits and chopping even more dollars from those benefits. Both scenarios filled Raquel with terror. If the program was cut, she worried, “I don’t know what all of us would do. They want us to work, but if there is nothing out there how are we going to do it?”

HOW MANY HOLES CAN YOU POKE IN A NET BEFORE IT’S JUST A HOLE?

In recent years, as the political climate has grown more conservative, and government finances have worsened, the American welfare system has increasingly shed itself of what were once considered key obligations. Accessing core benefits such as TANF has been made ever more difficult, in terms of the severity of the means tests imposed, the work requirements, and the add-on difficulties that some states tack on, such as drug-testing applicants and charging fees for the application. What does this mean in practice? Let’s look at a few examples: in Arkansas, despite unemployment increasing from 68,700 in December 2007 to 107,200 three years later, the number of families on TANF dropped by 100 families. In Missouri, unemployment increased by more than 75 percent, but TANF enrollments also fell slightly. In Florida, the TANF caseload went up by about $10,000, but the number of unemployed in the state increased by nearly 700,000. Moreover, total TANF expenditures in Florida in the ten years preceding 2011 had declined by well over $100 million.
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The same trends held true around the country. At the same time as it became harder to access TANF, the value of the benefits for those who
did
manage to access them declined. In all but two states, benefit levels as of 2012 were below what they were in 1996 (and by 1996, most states had already been cutting the real value of their welfare
benefits for a quarter century); and in no state in the country did the maximum TANF benefit get a family above 50 percent of the federally defined poverty line.

Let’s stick with this a bit longer. At the height of the recession, throughout most of the South TANF benefit levels declined to a mere one-fifth to one-tenth of the poverty line. In Mississippi, that meant that a family of four was averaging less than $200 a month in benefits. Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, Texas, Kentucky, North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Florida didn’t do much better; all had combined benefits that came to less than 20 percent, or, for a family of four, $4,500 annually, of the federal poverty guideline.
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Perhaps not coincidentally, in many of these states tax systems were peculiarly regressive, with income and property taxed at very low rates, and with sales taxes—which take a disproportionate percentage of the cash available to low-income Americans—filling in the revenue gaps. In other words, the meager benefits available to poor Alabamans or Mississippians, say, were rendered still more meager by the fact that staple goods such as food, purchased with these benefits, were made more expensive by the imposition of state taxes.

During the recession unleashed by the housing market collapse and fiscal meltdown of 2007–08, unemployment more than doubled in many states, yet, to reiterate the point, in most states the number of TANF enrollees increased either by a few percentage points only or actually decreased. Tiny Rhode Island’s welfare rolls went from 10,900 at the start of the recession to a mere 6,800 by the end of 2010. In a two-year period, Indiana saw the number of unemployed in the state more than double, from the end of 2007 through the end of 2009, while its welfare rolls were reduced by 10 percent. In Georgia, while the number of unemployed increased from 245,200 at the end of 2007 to nearly half a million by the end of 2010, TANF rolls during this period went down from 22,700 to 20,700. Nebraska also reduced its welfare rolls during these hardscrabble
years, as did North Carolina, North Dakota, and several other states.
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“In 1994–95, for every 100 families with children in poverty, the AFDC program served 75 families,” researchers from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) concluded in September 2011. “In 2008–09, only 28 families with children participated in TANF for every 100 families in poverty.” In Arkansas, that number was a mere 9 percent by the end of 2009; in Mississippi, 12 percent; in Alabama, 15 percent.

In California, the most populous state in the union, the Western Center on Law and Poverty estimated that 22 percent of kids were living at or below the poverty line in 2012, but only 3 percent were on TANF, and only one in five within that 3 percent actually received the maximum level of benefits. Many of these kids’ families, having nowhere else to turn, ended up on food lines. They were a mixture, said Jessica Jones of the Los Angeles Food Bank, of “the people who did everything right and had the rug pulled out from under them, and the people who were already struggling [and] are struggling even more. When I first started [working at the food bank] in December 2008, we served 39 million pounds of food. In 2010, we did 62 million pounds of food. The number of people we serve has gone up by 73 percent since the recession started.”

By the end of 2011, the real value of TANF was lower than it was in 1996 in every state except Maryland and Wyoming—which had preserved the value of the benefits it awarded but had made it almost impossible for families to enroll in the first place. In the entire state, only a few hundred people were on TANF as of 2012. Moreover, the nationwide fall-off in benefits post-1996 didn’t tell the full story: in the quarter century prior to the creation of TANF, AFDC benefits had also fallen across the country—by more than 20 percent, according to CBPP, in all but one state; by more than 40 percent in two-thirds of the states.
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By 2012, benefits had, as a result, been in a state of steady decline for four decades.

Even in the state of New York, which had preserved more “generous” welfare payments than any other state, a family of three could access a maximum of $753 a month in TANF, far shy of what was required to get such families even close to the federal poverty line. And in New York City, to access that money, a series of “reforms” pushed by Mayors Rudy Giuliani and then Michael Bloomberg, meant that even in the depth of the recession a recipient had to spend approximately thirty-five hours per week in what was ambitiously termed a “back to work” program. In reality, argued welfare rights advocates, despite its offices supposedly being equipped with numerous computers to help people on their job searches and staffed by numerous counselors to help people navigate the often-intimidating terrain of the employment market, this was little more than a sit-on-your-hands-and-twiddle-your-thumbs holding area. It was, said Barbara Zerzan, a woman who had worked on poverty-related themes in the city since the 1970s and who, in 2012, was an employee of a group called the East River Development Alliance, “like the rubber room. People lose it and just stop going. There’s insane fall-off.” People who were clearly poor enough to qualify for cash assistance instead were going without rather than enduring the humiliation of this process. “So most people end up not getting public assistance, even though they’ve applied and are eligible for it. They get Medicaid and food stamps, but not cash assistance. So they do things, commit crimes, fall behind on their rent. It’s a real disaster.”

If, somehow, they made it through several weeks of sitting on their hands seven hours each weekday, then they were channeled into WEP, New York’s version of workfare. In that capacity, they’d end up doing jobs such as park maintenance and street cleaning that in bygone years would have paid decent salaries to unionized workers.

For Zerzan, it was one of the most discouraging cycles that she had seen in all her years working on poverty in the Big Apple. “You’re
either at WEP or in the room doing nothing for your entire work week,” she explained of the men and women her organization campaigned on behalf of. “You’re not allowed to look for a job or go to your kid’s school or anything. It’s so insane.” It was, she felt, little more than a shell game: an expensive, bureaucratic system that claimed to encourage poor people to look for employment but that, in reality, made it extremely hard for them to do so, and, in so doing, oftentimes pushed them away from cash aid that they were legally entitled to. “I told my kids recently: ‘My goal is to eliminate poverty and to work on social justice. I’m a complete failure.’ It’s gone from bad to worse. There’s no humanity.”

A similarly dispiriting situation existed in Michigan, home to some of the country’s most depressed Rust Belt communities. In towns such as Flint, unemployment was rife, drug addiction and involvement with the criminal justice system was commonplace, and undereducation was a daily part of life. Illiteracy rates were stunningly high—in Genessee County, of which Flint was a part, about one in five adults were functionally illiterate, and amongst the welfare population estimates ranged as high as 70 percent. Tied in with that, many workers, left unemployed by the closure of auto factories and other heavy industries from the 1970s onward, didn’t have the skills needed to find new employment. What jobs there were tended to pay in the $8 an hour range, despite the fact that the Michigan League for Human Services estimated that for a family of four both parents would have to be working full time and earning at least $10.71 per hour in order for that family to have a modicum of economic security. Few workers in the area had the skills needed to secure them decently paying jobs.

And yet, said Alicia Booker, an employee of the Mott Foundation whose mandate was to focus on work issues, the state’s workfare system didn’t allow people to study for a GED or receive other basic education training in lieu of hours worked. Private foundations such as Mott and the Open Society Foundation pumped significant sums
of money into programs such as Earn and Learn, which subsidized the wages of workers hired by local companies in Flint in exchange for those individuals committing themselves to job retraining. But those programs only ever were Band-Aids, providing jobs and training to a few hundred people in a community with thousands of desperate, out of work laborers.

For those who didn’t get into such programs, prospects were increasingly bleak. In the 2011–12 fiscal year, the state’s Workforce Investment Act funds were cut by 21 percent, or $4 million. One consequence: During the years in which federal dollars from the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act flowed to Flint, 1,100 teenagers were provided with summer employment; in 2012, by contrast, with federal funds having dried up and with state cuts having kicked in, summer jobs for at-risk teens were all but eliminated. “In Flint, the murder capital of the world,” Booker caustically stated, “giving 1,100 kids employment makes a difference.”
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She continued: “One of the things the TANF community in our area needs is literacy.” But because GED training wasn’t considered to count toward hours worked, there was no incentive built in for the recipients of this aid to get more education. “What they need the most is considered non-core, nonessential. And so the cycle repeats.”

Increasingly, the poorest of the poor have found that they cannot access educational programs, or they have discovered that in pursuing education and not working the required number of hours to qualify for TANF they are excluding themselves from access to the cash economy.

RUNNING UPHILL

This is not merely a kink in the system, but a fundamental flaw in the design of the modern-day American safety net. Caught at the intersection of politics and economic malfunction, millions of American families are now almost totally excluded from the cash economy.
For many of them, simply getting up to the poverty line is an impossibility; they live in what the government terms “deep poverty,” accessing cash and cash-equivalent benefits that don’t even bring them up to half of the poverty threshold. Nearly 3 million children now live in households in which each person has less than $2 per day to spend.
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